Las Vegas is a city built on betting, but the argument at this year’s Global Gaming Expo was about who gets to take the wagers. The annual trade show, held at the Venetian Expo, usually hums with slot machines and sportsbook pitches. This year, however, the loudest debate centered on prediction markets—the online platforms that let people wager on everything from elections to corporate mergers and have increasingly drawn the wrath of state gaming regulators. The topic was everywhere: in breakout sessions, in hallways, in opening speeches. So when Wynn Resorts CEO Craig Billings joined a roundtable with the heads of Caesars Entertainment and MGM Resorts International, the crowd likely expected a united front. Instead, Billings offered a quiet, almost philosophical shrug. “We don’t take a political position on prediction markets because we don’t have skin in the game,” he said. He acknowledged that the broad distribution of online gaming and betting offers some benefit to Las Vegas, but he was careful not to wade into legal questions. “I’m not opining on the legality,” he said. He also admitted Wynn hasn’t seen direct effects from prediction markets, though he allowed that indirect impacts could emerge over time. For a man whose company runs Wynn Las Vegas and Encore Las Vegas, it was a notably detached take—and one that set him apart from nearly everyone else onstage. His fellow CEOs would spend the next hour describing prediction markets as dangerous, unregulated, and even obscene. Billings, by contrast, seemed almost relaxed about the whole thing, suggesting that the industry’s panic might be overblown. It was a moment that captured a broader tension inside the casino business: whether to fight new forms of gambling tooth-and-nail or accept that the market is evolving and find a way to live with it. Billings’s own history made his neutrality easier to understand. Wynn had launched an online sportsbook and casino platform called WynnBET in 2020, but by August 2023 the company was shutting it down, saying the ultra-competitive sports betting landscape was draining resources. In other words, Wynn no longer had a direct stake in the online sports betting wars—and Billings was free to talk about prediction markets the way a retiree talks about office politics.
Billings’s neutrality made him an outlier in a conference that treated prediction markets almost like an invading force. In his opening remarks, American Gaming Association CEO Bill Miller did not mince words. Prediction markets, he said, are accepting sports wagers without paying gaming taxes, ignoring state gaming laws, and trampling tribal sovereignty. He insisted the legal challenges are going well: prediction markets have lost 90 percent of their court cases against states, including the last 15 decisions. “If this ultimately ends at the Supreme Court, we have the facts on our side and are well positioned to win,” Miller said. The message was clear: the regulated gaming industry sees prediction markets not as a clever financial innovation but as an existential threat. They are, in effect, operating like sportsbooks without a license, offering odds on events that look suspiciously like sports and politics, while contributing nothing to the state coffers that fund schools, infrastructure, and problem-gambling programs. For casino executives who have spent billions on compliance and licensing, that feels profoundly unfair. It also threatens the carefully constructed legal framework that allows gambling to exist in the United States—a framework built on state compacts, tribal agreements, and layers of oversight. The industry’s argument isn’t just about money; it’s about legitimacy. If anyone can take bets without a license, then what was the point of all those background checks, fees, and responsible-gaming requirements? That sense of indignation was palpable throughout the conference, and it made Billings’s calm detachment all the more striking. When it was his turn, Billings didn’t echo any of that. He didn’t call prediction markets illegal or immoral. He simply observed that the wider spread of betting might ultimately be good for Las Vegas, because it normalizes gambling for millions of people. That is a hard argument to hear for executives who feel they are being undercut by unlicensed competitors, but Billings made it sound almost reasonable. The result was a rare public split among the leaders of the three biggest Strip operators, and it hinted at a strategic divide that could shape the industry’s response in the years ahead.
Billings didn’t stop at saying Wynn had no skin in the game. He offered a history lesson that seemed aimed directly at his fellow CEOs. He reminded the audience of the Strip’s opposition to California tribal gaming ballot questions in 1998 and 2000. Back then, Nevada resort operators saw tribal casinos in California as a direct threat to their business. They poured money into campaigns against the measures, sometimes quietly and, in Billings’s words, “very surreptitiously funneled money” into the effort. Both ballot questions won anyway, with more than 60 percent support. A quarter century later, California’s tribal gaming market generates more than $12.6 billion in annual gaming revenue. You might think that would be the worst-case scenario for Las Vegas. But Billings argued the opposite. The presence of tribal casinos, he said, created a huge population of Californians who became comfortable with gambling and, eventually, open to making the trip to Las Vegas. “Of course, they lost,” he said of the Strip’s campaign, “and what did we end up with? We ended up with a whole army of people in California that were inert to coming to Las Vegas.” The lesson, as he framed it, was that fighting the expansion of gambling doesn’t always protect your market—it can actually help grow it. People who gamble at home are more likely to gamble when they travel. By trying to keep tribal casinos out of California, the Strip may have accidentally created its own future customer base. It was a pointed way of saying that the current panic over prediction markets might be shortsighted, and that the industry’s instinct to crush new competitors could backfire. Maybe, Billings seemed to suggest, prediction markets will do the same for the next generation of bettors—not by stealing customers from casinos, but by making betting so familiar that the idea of flying to Las Vegas feels natural. It was not an argument for deregulation, exactly, but it was a reminder that Las Vegas has survived—and sometimes thrived—after losing battles against new forms of gambling.
Caesars CEO Tom Reeg had a different memory, and he was not about to let Billings’s history lesson go unanswered. Reeg compared the current fight over prediction markets to the industry’s battle against daily fantasy sports operators more than a decade ago. Back then, states including Nevada banned daily fantasy sports, and the established gaming industry celebrated. But the victory was short-lived. Once the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting in 2018, companies like DraftKings and FanDuel—which had built their brands through daily fantasy—were suddenly licensed sportsbook operators in more than two dozen states. “We’ve lived through this before,” Reeg said, suggesting that prediction market operators would benefit from state regulation rather than outright prohibition. He then offered a story that made the abstract debate feel personal. He said that before Caesars announced its $17.6 billion merger with Fertitta Entertainment in May, Kalshi—a leading prediction market platform—had put up a market asking whether Caesars would be acquired in 2026. Reeg said there was nothing in Kalshi’s rules that would have prevented him from placing a wager on his own company’s future. “Obviously, I didn’t,” he said. But the fact that it was possible struck him as astonishing. Reeg’s worry wasn’t just about unfair competition. It was about the chaos that can come from an unregulated market. “What we’re talking about here is amusing,” he said, “but I worry that something awful is going to come out [or] going to happen in this interim period because of the lack of regulation and oversight.” If that happens, he argued, it would tarnish everyone—regulated casinos and prediction markets alike. In other words, Reeg wasn’t asking for the new platforms to be destroyed; he was asking for them to be brought inside the tent, licensed and supervised like everyone else. His position was more pragmatic than Miller’s but still firmly on the side of regulation. He didn’t think prediction markets were going away; he just wanted them to play by the same rules.
MGM Resorts CEO Bill Hornbuckle was the most blunt, and his voice carried the moral outrage that Billings’s calm detachment lacked. Hornbuckle said it was “obscene” that prediction markets were attempting to operate in Utah—one of only two states, along with Hawaii, that bans all forms of legal gambling. “That [state] wants nothing to do with gambling. It’s their right,” he said. “It’s no tax, no jobs, and I could go on and on.” He accused prediction market leaders of a cavalier approach that was hurting the industry. If they want to operate, he said, they should come to Nevada, get a license, and do what everyone else does. “Then God bless them.” The contrast with Billings was stark. But part of that difference may come down to corporate circumstances. Wynn once had WynnBET, an online sports betting and casino platform launched in 2020, but the company began shutting it down in August 2023, describing the ultra-competitive sports betting landscape as a drain on resources. Caesars and MGM, by contrast, remain deeply invested in national sports betting through Caesars Sportsbook and BetMGM. BetMGM CEO Adam Greenblatt echoed Hornbuckle’s stance in an interview, saying his company was not interested in prediction markets because “our stance is aligned with our states, our regulators, politicians and tribes.” He also pointed to a worrying trend: during the recent World Cup soccer tournament, unregulated prediction markets “sliced heavily” into traditional sports betting platforms, representing 75 percent of all the spending in that category. For MGM and Caesars, this isn’t an abstract philosophical debate—it’s a direct hit to their bottom line. When Hornbuckle finished, the sentiment in the room seemed to shift back toward the industry’s hard line. If there was any doubt that prediction markets are the enemy, his words erased it.
By the end of the roundtable, the three CEOs had effectively staked out three different positions. Hornbuckle wanted to fight. Reeg wanted to regulate. Billings wanted to wait and see. That split is more than a matter of personality—it reflects the different ways gaming companies have positioned themselves in a rapidly changing market. MGM and Caesars have built massive national sportsbook operations and have every reason to defend the regulated system that allows them to operate. Wynn, having abandoned WynnBET, has less to lose and can afford to view prediction markets with the detached curiosity of an observer. But the underlying question is the same for all of them: what happens when betting becomes so easy, so ubiquitous, and so unregulated that the old rules no longer apply? The industry’s leaders are not naive. They know that prediction markets are not going to disappear because a trade association gives a speech or a court case goes their way. The legal fight may end up at the Supreme Court, where Miller insists the facts are on the industry’s side. But Billings’s California story serves as a reminder that winning in court and winning in the marketplace are not the same thing. The Strip lost the battle against tribal gaming and arguably won the war, because millions of Californians became lifelong casino customers. Maybe the same will happen with prediction markets. Or maybe Reeg is right, and an unregulated disaster will force a reckoning that damages everyone. For now, the only consensus is uncertainty. The conference moved on, the booths were packed up, and the executives flew home to plan their next moves. But the image of Craig Billings shrugging while his peers seethed was hard to shake. In a town built on risk, the biggest gamble may be the one Las Vegas takes on its own future. One thing is clear: the debate is not really about prediction markets at all. It’s about who gets to decide what counts as gambling, who benefits from it, and who is responsible for the consequences. That question will not be settled by a single panel or a single court decision. It will be settled by the messy, human process of people choosing where to place their bets—and that, in the end, is something even a casino CEO cannot control.